Tapes

The impending release of Build A Harbour Immediately by Adam Stafford, on a yellow cassette, got me to thinking about tapes.

First off, Adam (ex-Y'all Is Fantasy Island) really is an incredibly talented man, I could write for ages about all of the things he has done but it's better that you see/hear/read for yourself:

http://www.accidentalmedia.com/adam_stafford.php

Oh, and go and see him play in Stereo this Saturday 20th August!

Anyway, back to tapes. I was fascinated by tapes as a kid, I wondered how all of the voices and instruments were held on this piece of plastic (this partly explains my study of Music and Audio Technology). I still own tapes and still have something to occasionally play them on which fills me with nostalgia.

Cassette tapes are a little piece of my teenage years that I can't leave behind. There are so many people who will wax lyrical about the humble cassette and the time, effort, thought and patience that went into making a mix tape for a friend or the boy/girl that put a twinkle in your eye. I have made so many tapes over the years for a few deserving (and subsequently undeserving) people and a few copies linger in my tape drawer.

"To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention............then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and...oh, there are loads of rules".

Anyone who has ever made a mix on a cassette tape will know how true the quote from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is. Giving someone a cassette that you had made was the outcome of a lot of thought and a large amount of time. I wonder how many people my age still even own a cassette?

Seeing the way we listen to, how we share and consume music be revolutionised in my own lifetime (I'm in my late 20s so it's not exactly a long time!) got me thinking about how unlikely it is that my niece and nephew will own CD's when it's their time to discover music for themselves. In the last 10 years alone we have gone from CD to minidisc to MP3.....where next?

I could write for hours about physical media versus digital (in terms of CD's vs MP3s) but now isn't the time. Maybe another day.